Daunton M. The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 3: 1840-1950
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Stephen A. Royle
Table . Population figures of small towns mentioned in the text
To w n m m
Abergavenny , , ,
Aberystwyth , , , ()
Ashby de la Zouch , , ,
Banbury , , ()
Bangor , ,
Barry n/a
Beaumaris , , ,
Beccles , , ,
Blaenavon , , ()
Braintree , , , ()
Brecon , , ,
Bridgend n/a
Bridgnorth , , ,
Briton Ferry , , ,
Bromsgrove , , , ()
Bungay , , ,
Caernarfon , , ()
Caerphilly , ,
Cardiff n/a
Cardigan , , , ()
Carmarthen n/a
Castle Donnington , , ,
Chelmsford , , ()
Chepstow , , ,
Chichester , ,
Coalville n/a
Coggeshall , , ,
Colchester n/a
Cowbridge , , ,
Cullen , , ,
Dingwall , , ,
Diss , , ,
Dolgellau , , ,
Eye , , ,
Fakenham , , ,
Fishguard , , ,
Flint , , , ()
Hallaton , , ,
Halstead , , ,
Haverfordwest , , ,
Helensburgh , , ,
Hinckley , ,
Invergordon , () , ,
Ipswich n/a
Kelso , , ,
Kenninghall , , ,
Kingston-upon-Thames , , ()
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The development of small towns in Britain
Table . (cont.)
To w n m m
Kirkwall , , ,
Leek , , ()
Lerwick , , ,
Lewes , , ()
Liverpool n/a
Loughborough n/a
Ludlow , , ,
Lutterworth , , ,
Lynn n/a
Market Bosworth , , ,
Market Harborough , , ,
Marlborough , , ,
Melton Mowbray , , , ()
Merthyr Tydfil n/a
Millport , () , ,
Mold , , ()
Monmouth , , ,
Newport n/a
Newtown , , ,
North Berwick , , ,
North Walsham , , ,
Norwich n/a
Penarth , ,
Pwllheli , , ,
Reigate , , ()
Richmond , , ()
Romford , ,
Rothesay , , , ()
Saffron Walden , , ,
Stornoway , , ,
Stowmarket , , ,
Stranraer , , ,
Stromness , , ,
Sunderland n/a
Swaffham , , ,
Swansea n/a
Swindon , , ()
Towyn , , ,
Welshpool , , ,
Woodbridge , , ,
Worsborough n/a
Yarmouth n/a
Those towns with n/a do not feature in the cohort of small towns.
Towns drop out of the cohort if they reach ,.
Source: census figures.
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Stephen A. Royle
Map . Distribution of small towns (under ,) in Great Britain
(with some additional Scottish burghs for )
Source: based on census data.
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The development of small towns in Britain
Map . Proportion of county populations living in small towns in Great
Britain
Source: based on census data.
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sorts of area can be identified where small towns were uncommon and/or
unimportant.
First, of course, there were few in the London area including Middlesex
county. Indeed, following Clark and Hosking’s ruling,
11
Middlesex was excluded
from this analysis, as were the Scottish ‘counties of the town of . . .’. Secondly,
small towns were unimportant in counties which industrialised early. These
counties formed a wishbone pattern surrounding Derbyshire, running from
Nottinghamshire anticlockwise through the West Riding of Yorkshire,
Lancashire, Cheshire, Staffordshire and Warwickshire, together with Glamorgan
in Wales. Many former market towns in these counties had already assumed
industrial functions which attracted migrants and took their population beyond
the , threshold. For example, Nottinghamshire had only six small towns
left in contrast to rural Wiltshire which, with a similar total population (,
to Nottinghamshire’s ,), had twenty-five.
A third category of area where small towns were unimportant consisted of
sparsely populated rural counties with a limited urban network – Sutherland is
the best example. Other rural counties had higher population densities asso-
ciated with a full network of market towns and these stand out as having a large
proportion of their population in small towns. Examples included Dorset,
Wiltshire and Shropshire in England; Anglesey and Caernarfon in Wales and
Nairn and Banffshire in Scotland. Other high totals were recorded in places
being affected by the initial stages of metropolitan growth as in Surrey and
Hertfordshire, or the development of small industrial towns as in the Central
Valley of Scotland. Indeed, in Scotland, much change was taking place to the
overall settlement pattern, though not all of it shows up on Maps . and ..
Shortly before the start of the study period agricultural reform, particularly in
north-east Scotland, saw people pushed from their former landholdings to new
planned villages but few became even small towns, despite pretensions – New
Leeds bears little resemblance to old Leeds.
12
However, during this fashion for
rebuilding and improvement, some substantial towns were affected. Ian Adams
details the development of Cullen where the landowner, the earl of Seafield,
ordered a land surveyor to ‘set about the removal of the present town of Cullen
and to have a new one gradually erected in order to save the heavy annual
expense it costs to keep the swarm of worthless old houses from tumbling about
the tenants’ heads’.
13
Work began in and the scale of the project can be
gauged from the fact that Cullen was in the largest of Banffshire’s small
towns.
Alan Everitt estimated that between one third and half the Victorian English
Stephen A. Royle
11
Clark and Hosking, Population Estimates.
12
D. G. Lockhart, ‘Scottish village plans: a preliminary analysis’, Scottish Geographical Magazine,
(), –.
13
I. H. Adams, The Making of Urban Scotland (London, ), p. .
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population lived in or were dependent upon provincial market towns;
14
the data
here show that overall in Great Britain in . million people lived in the
small towns, . per cent of the total population (Table .). Table . dem-
onstrates something of the variability of the economic activity of small towns at
this time by presenting information on some of those in Leicestershire, taken
from census enumerators’ books. In Leicestershire had six main market
towns: Ashby de la Zouch, Loughborough, Melton Mowbray, Market
Harborough, Hinckley and Lutterworth, arranged, in a symmetry redolent of
The development of small towns in Britain
14
A. Everitt, ‘Town and country in Victorian Leicestershire: the role of the village carrier’, in A.
Everitt, ed., Perspectives in English Urban History (London, ).
Table . British country and market town statistics –
Great Britain
Total population
a
,, ,, ,,
Population in small towns ,, ,, ,,
Number of small towns
b
()
c
,,
% in small towns . ,, . .
England
Total population
a
,, ,, ,,
Population in small towns ,, ,, ,,
Number of small towns
b
,,
% in small towns . ,,. .
Scotland
Total population
a
,, ,, ,,
Population in small towns , ,, ,
Number of small towns
b
()
c
,,
% in small towns . ,,. .
Wales
Total population
a
,, ,, ,,
Population in small towns , ,, ,
Number of small towns
b
% in small towns . . .
a
The total population excludes London, Middlesex and the Scottish ‘counties of the
towns of . . . ’.
b
Those identified as towns or burghs in the three lists by as discussed in the text
and whose population was less than ,.
c
Including the thirty-five Scottish burghs whose population was only listed from .
Source: census figures.
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the tenets of central-place theory, around the county town of Leicester.
Leicestershire’s other market towns such as Hallaton, Market Bosworth and
Castle Donnington had become less important by this period.
15
Lutterworth’s
occupational structure in reveals this town to have had a traditional role. Of
its workforce, per cent remained on the land but per cent were in services,
a distribution that placed Lutterworth within the parameters for the recognition
of a mid-nineteenth-century rural town, rather than just a village.
16
Lutterworth
still concentrated on services: ‘the local focus of human life and activities, com-
mercial, industrial, administrative and cultural’.
17
Lutterworth’s market was (and
is) on Thursdays on the spot where it had been held since and Lutterworth
retained its tradition of providing public houses, an activity described as its ‘staple
business’ for the late eighteenth century.
18
Although it had some textile workers, Lutterworth by had been little
affected by developments that elsewhere in Leicestershire were leading to func-
tional diversification of the small towns.
19
Hinckley, for example, was heavily
involved in framework knitting. At that time this was largely a domestic industry
Stephen A. Royle
15
J. M. Lee, ‘The rise and fall of a market town: Castle Donnington in the nineteenth century’,
Transactions, Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society, (), –.
16
Dickinson, ‘East Anglia’.
17
Ibid., .
18
A. H. Dyson, Lutterworth (London, ).
19
S. A. Royle, ‘Aspects of nineteenth century small town society: a comparative study from
Leicestershire’, Midland History, (–), –.
Table . Occupational structure of selected Leicestershire towns
Melton
% of workforce in: Coalville Hinckley Lutterworth Mowbray
Primary industry ....
Coal mining ....
Agriculture ....
Secondary industry, including ....
Textiles ....
Shoemaking ....
Tertiary industry, including ....
Traders ....
Professionals ....
Servants ....
Grooms ....
Others, including ....
Labourers ....
Out paupers ....
Annuitants ....
Population , , , ,
Source: census enumerators’ books.
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and Hinckley might be described as being only proto-industrial. Though it
retained its marketing functions, its major economic activity was the processing
of American cotton which certainly took it away from being a traditional country
town. Elsewhere, Loughborough had also begun to industrialise, but Ashby de la
Zouch and Market Harborough remained more traditional. Melton Mowbray
had changed, too, but still maintained rural links, its manufacturing related to
food processing (pork pies, Stilton cheese and, later, dog food) as well as the ser-
vicing and accommodation of the fox-hunting ‘“gentlemen” as they are called in
Melton Mowbray’ who stayed here in the season.
20
Hence the large number of
grooms in Melton Mowbray. Leicestershire’s small towns had been increased in
number by the development of a mining town, Coalville, which, as its popula-
tion grew, added marketing functions to its mining village activities.
21
Everitt
points out that the city of Leicester, though it dominated the higher-order
central-place activities of the county, with regard to low-order needs attracted
only one third of its clientele from the city itself whereas a market town like
Melton Mowbray attracted three-quarters of its ‘shopping population’ from the
countryside, evidence of traditional small-town–countryside interaction.
22
Lerwick, chief town of the Shetland Islands, can serve as an example of a small
Scottish town. Lerwick was a port but had also the range of occupations of a
central place and market town. The enumerators’ returns for identify some
textile working and domestic service among the women whilst ‘among the men
there were of course a number of merchants, shopkeepers and shop assistants . . .
many coopers, carpenters and ships’ carpenters. There were masons, joiners,
shoemakers, plumbers, tailors, bakers, clerks, blacksmiths, watermen, tobaccon-
ists, writers, fishermen and a mixed bag of officials. And of course there were
boatmen.’
23
For Wales, Carter points out that for a town to ‘survive depended ultimately
on the demand for urban services set up in the surrounding countryside’.
24
He
shows how the urban network bequeathed to the principality largely from the
Normans’ need to subjugate its people was affected later by the local opportu-
nities, the original network having been ‘over-elaborate for the economic con-
ditions which characterised the succeeding age’.
25
By the mid-nineteenth century marketing had developed more and, using
data from the s, Carter devised a four tier hierarchy for Welsh towns based
on functional criteria. On top were places such as Cardiff, Swansea and
Carmarthen. Lower down were small market towns acting in the traditional
manner, such as Pwllheli and Dolgellau. A contemporary description of Pwllheli
in remarked that
The development of small towns in Britain
20
J. Brownlow, Melton Mowbray, Queen of the Shires (Wymondham, ), p. .
21
S. A. Royle, ‘The development of Coalville, Leicestershire, in the nineteenth century’, East
Midland Geographer, (), –.
22
Everitt, ‘Leicestershire’.
23
J. W. Irvine, Lerwick (Lerwick, ), p. .
24
Carter, The Towns of Wales, p. .
25
Ibid., p.
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the commerce consists entirely of the importation of coal and shop goods from
Liverpool for the supply of which to the surrounding country Pwllheli forms a
great depot and is thus, though small, rendered a flourishing place. The market . . .
is well supplied . . . with all . . . kinds of provisions . . . and there being no other
market held near, it is resorted to by persons living at the furthest extremities of
the peninsula of Lleyn.
26
As Carter notes, ‘these towns were carrying out functions very similar in nature
but not in order to those of Carmarthen and the other grade towns’.
27
Lower still were ‘a large number of small market towns whose dominance was
local and limited’.
28
Everitt identified the mechanism linking the towns and their
hinterlands with his estimate that ,–, local carriers travelled the
English lanes at mid-century.
29
Town life varied with the type of town. In resort towns patronised by the
wealthy it was genteel, doubtless – consider Barsetshire’s country balls – but even
having aristocrats in residence did not guarantee a quiet life. Thus, in the fox-
hunting resort of Melton Mowbray on one occasion in , led by the marquis
of Waterford, the ‘gentlemen’ – hooligans in another age or class – in a partic-
ularly baleful drunken spree ‘painted the town red’, the incident giving rise to
the phrase.
30
By contrast, life within the traditional country town was, for most people,
hard. In Lerwick in the first half of the century:
Gross overcrowding was accepted [there were houses in with an average
occupancy of . persons]. There was no running water, no sewage, little or no
drainage, no street lighting, no planning. Every summer there was an acute short-
age of water as the wells ran dry. Increasingly the disposal – or lack of disposal –
of human excreta became a major problem. Night soil thrown daily in the lanes
added to the effluvium of the insanitary little town.
31
The town council, founded in , attempted to remedy the situation but was
handicapped by a lack of finance. They were aided from , as elsewhere in
Scotland, by the Commissioners of Police whose duties included also the levying
of rates for town improvement. Others shared the insanitary conditions of
Lerwick’s people. In Worsborough as late as night soil men were photo-
graphed in formal pose, shovels at the ready.
32
Even country towns which had
taken on additional functions to support their economy did not necessarily
prosper as a result. The present author wanted to entitle a paper on Hinckley in
Stephen A. Royle
26
S. Lewis, A Topographical Dictionary of Wales, rd edn (London, ).
27
Carter, The Towns of Wales, p. .
28
Ibid., p. .
29
Everitt, ‘Leicestershire’.
30
See Nimrod (pseudonym of C. J. Apperly), The Life of a Sportsman (London, ), for a fictional
account of such a life at Melton Mowbray; M. Frewen, Melton Mowbray and Other Memories
(London, ), for the autobiography of one who actually lived that life and Brownlow, Melton
Mowbray, for the local historian’s view.
31
Irvine, Lerwick, p. .
32
Reproduced in the Local Historian in .
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the s with a contemporary quotation: ‘the town is certainly in a stinking
state’ but was overruled by a sensitive editor who required him to settle for ‘the
spiritual destitution is excessive – the poverty overwhelming’.
33
The poverty,
which presumably worsened the stink, was caused by a downturn in demand for
the town’s principal product of cotton stockings, made largely on domestic
frames. An anonymous poet captured the mood of Hinckley at this period:
A weaver of ’inckley sot in ’is frame
’is children stood mernfully by,
’is wife pained with ’unger, near naked with shame,
As she ’opelessly gazed at the sky.
The tears rolling fast from ’er famishing eyes
Proclaimed ’er from ’unger not free,
And these were the words she breathed with a sigh,
‘I weep, poor ’inckley, for thee’.
34
In the same decade the market town and silk manufacturing centre of Leek in
Staffordshire was involved in Chartist unrest; in the s there had been strikes
by both handloom weavers and mill hands protesting about conditions.
35
However, perhaps if only to the jaded city dweller, the country town of the
nineteenth century had attractions because of its continuing localism. In mid-
century it seemed still to have a balance between
rural backwardness and city discomfort. Here . . . freedom and enterprise would
obtain still but viciousness would be neutralised by a stability and civic-minded-
ness fed from deep wells of continuity and convention. The reason was that most
families would be native to the community. Social and religious teaching would
be heeded; personal and class co-operation would be a habit.
36
Henry James had a fondness for Ludlow in the s, ‘a town not disfigured by
industry “[which] exhibits no tall chimneys and smoke streamers, no attendant
purlieus and slums’’’,
37
though, by that time, Ludlow, like Hinckley, Leek and
others, did have an industrial sector, in malting, glove making and paper manu-
facturing. That much small-town industry was often either domestic or traditional
and rurally linked (such as food processing, including brewing) did not necessar-
ily mean that conditions were good. In Bromsgrove nail making, button making
and cloth manufacture in small workshops in courts and rows behind the major
streets produced conditions of employment ‘generally of the scraping and sweated
sort, exploiting in-migrants from the countryside’.
38
This mention of the courts
and rows leads into a consideration of the internal layout of these small towns.
The development of small towns in Britain
33
S. A. Royle, ‘“The spiritual destitution is excessive – the poverty overwhelming”: Hinckley in
the mid-nineteenth century’, Transactions, Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society,
(–), –.
34
Cited in H. J. Francis, A History of Hinckley (Hinckley, ), p. .
35
M. W. Greenslade, ‘Leek and Lowe’, in VCH, Staffordshire, , pp. –.
36
P. J. Waller, Town, City and Nation (Oxford, ), p. .
37
Ibid., p. .
38
Ibid., p. .
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